There was a small pocket of good weather on our journey to a spa day on Tuesday, so my friend Jane and I had the top down on her car and sang and the top of our voices in the sunshine. While we were murdering Take on me by Aha we discovered that neither of us had a clue what the lyrics of the 3rd verse were and just fudged our way through with our own made up words.

It got me thinking about how we sometimes get lyrics wrong, while being absolutely convinced that we are correct. Phoebe from Friends famously sang “hold me close Tony Danza” instead of “hold me close tiny dancer” by Elton John. Another example I found online from Bon Jovi’s Living on a prayer, “it doesn’t make a difference if we’re naked or not”, which should be “it doesn’t make a different if we make it or not”.

Getting lyrics wrong is not a new thing for me, I was only 7 when Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen was first released. Nevertheless I felt confident that I knew every word and sang with conviction every time it came on the radio. My dad fell about laughing one day when he heard me get to the part “spare him his life from this monstrosity”, I actually sang “sparing his life from his hot sausage tea”.

One of my new year resolutions is not to die of boring old fartitis and to get out more. To this end my bestie, (Jane), and I decided to frequent the local pub for the weekly pub quiz.

Pub quizzes emerged in the late 1970’s having been created by a duo called Burns and Porter. A study done in 2009 revealed that that were 22,445 regular weekly pub quizzes in the UK. It is also a popular past time outside of the UK too, when I lived in Turkey a lot of my nights out, especially in the winter, were in ex pat bars at the weekly quiz.

With the evolution of mobile phones cheating has become a big problem, some pubs actually take away participants phones before the quiz starts. But one came up with a novel idea whereby rigging up a FM radio tuner to a PA system, when a mobile phone was used it emitted electromagnetic interference and made a low pulsing sound, showing up the cheaters.

We didn’t resort to cheating as we managed to pilfer answers from other teams who felt sorry for us. It didn’t do us any good as we ended up second from last. But we are not deterred by this result and plan to go back next week having done our homework, ie; watching Pointless and The Chase.